“6kbbs V8.0 is a PHP + MySQL built using high-performance forum, has the code simple, easy to use, powerful, fast and so on. It is an excellent community forum program. The program is simple but not simple; fast, small; Interface generous and good scalability; functional and practical pursuing superior performance, good interface, the user’s preferred utility functions."

“1, using XHTML + CSS architecture, so that the structure of the page, saving transmission static page code, but also easy to modify the interface, more in line with WEB standards; 2, the Forum adopted Cookies, Session, Application and other technical data cache on the forum, reducing access to the database to improve the performance of the Forum. Can carry more users simultaneously access; 3, the data points table function, reduce the burden on the amount of data when accessing the database; 4, support for multi-skin style switching function; 5, the use of RSS technology to support subscriptions forum posts, recent posts, user’s posts; 6, the display frame mode + tablet mode, the user can choose according to their own preferences to; 7. forum page optimization keyword search, so the forum more easily indexed by search engines; 8, extension, for our friends to provide a forum for a broad expansion of space services; 9, webmasters can add different top and bottom of the ad, depending on the layout; 10, post using HTML + UBB way the two editors, mutual conversion, compatible with each other; …"

(2) Vulnerability Details:

6kbbs web application has a computer cyber security bug problem. It can be exploited by CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks. This may allow an attacker to trick the victim into clicking on the image to take advantage of the trust relationship between the authenticated victim and the application. Such an attack could trick the victim into creating files that may then be called via a separate CSRF attack or possibly other means, and executed in the context of their session with the application, without further prompting or verification.

Several 6kbbs products 0-day vulnerabilities have been found by some other bug hunter researchers before. 6kbbs has patched some of them. Open Sourced Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) is an independent and open-sourced database. The goal of the project is to provide accurate, detailed, current, and unbiased technical information on security vulnerabilities. The project promotes greater, open collaboration between companies and individuals. It has published suggestions, advisories, solutions details related to csrf vulnerabilities.

(2.1) The first code programming flaw occurs at “/portalchannel_ajax.php?" page with “&id" and &code" parameters in HTTP $POST.

(2.2) The second code programming flaw occurs at “/admin.php?" page with “&fileids" parameter in HTTP $POST.

“ESPN (originally an acronym for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is a U.S.-based global cable and satellite television channel that is owned by ESPN Inc., a joint venture between The Walt Disney Company (which operates the network, through its 80% controlling ownership interest) and Hearst Corporation (which holds the remaining 20% interest). The channel focuses on sports-related programming including live and recorded event telecasts, sports news and talk shows, and other original programming.

ESPN broadcasts primarily from studio facilities located in Bristol, Connecticut. The network also operates offices in Miami, New York City, Seattle, Charlotte, and Los Angeles. John Skipper currently serves as president of ESPN, a position he has held since January 1, 2012. While ESPN is one of the most successful sports networks, it has been subject to criticism, which includes accusations of biased coverage, conflict of interest, and controversies with individual broadcasters and analysts. ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut. As of February 2015, ESPN is available to approximately 94,396,000 paid television households (81.1% of households with at least one television set) in the United States. In addition to the flagship channel and its seven related channels in the United States, ESPN broadcasts in more than 200 countries, operating regional channels in Australia, Brazil, Latin America and the United Kingdom, and owning a 20% interest in The Sports Network (TSN) as well as its five sister networks and NHL Network in Canada."(Wikipedia)

Vulnerability description:

Espn.go.com has a cyber security bug problem. It is vulnerable to XSS (Cross Site Scripting) and Dest Redirect Privilege Escalation (Open Redirect) attacks.

Those vulnerabilities are very dangerous. Since they happen at ESPN’s “login" & “register" pages that are credible. Attackers can abuse those links to mislead ESPN’s users. The success rate of attacks may be high.

During the tests, besides the links given above, large number of ESPN’s links are vulnerable to those attacks.

“The Full Disclosure mailing list is a public forum for detailed discussion of vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques, as well as tools, papers, news, and events of interest to the community. FD differs from other security lists in its open nature and support for researchers’ right to decide how to disclose their own discovered bugs. The full disclosure movement has been credited with forcing vendors to better secure their products and to publicly acknowledge and fix flaws rather than hide them. Vendor legal intimidation and censorship attempts are not tolerated here!" A great many of the fllowing web securities have been published here, Injection, Broken Authentication and Session Management, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Insecure Direct Object References, Security Misconfiguration, Sensitive Data Exposure, Missing Function Level Access Control, Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities, Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards. It also publishes suggestions, advisories, solutions details related to XSS and Open Redirect vulnerabilities and cyber intelligence recommendations.

(1) XSS Web Security Vulnerability

XSS may allow a remote attacker to create a specially crafted request that would execute arbitrary script code in a user’s browser session within the trust relationship between their browser and the server. Base on Acunetix, exploited XSS is commonly used to achieve the following malicious results

From OWASP, an open redirect is an application that takes a parameter and redirects a user to the parameter value without any validation. This vulnerability is used in phishing attacks to get users to visit malicious sites without realizing it. This could allow a user to create a specially crafted URL, that if clicked, would redirect a victim from the intended legitimate web site to an arbitrary web site of the attacker’s choosing. Such attacks are useful as the crafted URL initially appear to be a web page of a trusted site. This could be leveraged to direct an unsuspecting user to a web page containing attacks that target client side software such as a web browser or document rendering programs.

Google DoubleClick.net (Advertising) System URL Redirection Vulnerabilities Could Be Used by Spammers

Although Google does not include Open Redirect vulnerabilities in its bug bounty program, its preventive measures against Open Redirect attacks have been quite thorough and effective to date.

However, Google might have overlooked the security of its DoubleClick.net ​advertising system. After some test, it is found that most of the redirection URLs within DoubleClick.net are vulnerable to Open Redirect vulnerabilities. Many redirection are likely to be affected. This could allow a user to create a specially crafted URL, that if clicked, would redirect a victim from the intended legitimate web site to an arbitrary web site of the attacker’s choosing. Such attacks are useful as the crafted URL initially appear to be a web page of a trusted site. This could be leveraged to direct an unsuspecting user to a web page containing attacks that target client side software such as a web browser or document rendering programs.

These redirections can be easily used by spammers, too.

Some URLs belong to Googleads.g.Doubleclick.net are vulnerable to Open Redirect attacks, too. While Google prevents similar URL redirections other than Googleads.g.Doubleclick.net. Attackers can use URLs related to Google Account to make the attacks more powerful.

Moreover, these vulnerabilities can be used to attack other companies such as Google, eBay, The New York Times, Amazon, Godaddy, Yahoo, Netease, e.g. by bypassing their Open Redirect filters (Covert Redirect). These cyber security security bug problems have not been patched. Other similar web and computer attacks will be published in the near future.

“DoubleClick is a subsidiary of Google which develops and provides Internet ad serving services. Its clients include agencies, marketers (Universal McCann, AKQA etc.) and publishers who serve customers like Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, L’Oréal, Palm, Inc., Apple Inc., Visa USA, Nike, Carlsberg among others. DoubleClick’s headquarters is in New York City, United States.

DoubleClick was founded in 1996 by Kevin O’Connor and Dwight Merriman. It was formerly listed as “DCLK" on the NASDAQ, and was purchased by private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and JMI Equity in July 2005. In March 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for US$3.1 billion. Unlike many other dot-com companies, it survived the dot-com bubble and focuses on uploading ads and reporting their performance." (Wikipedia)

(1.2) Reports Related to Google DoubleClick.net Used by Spammers

(1.2.1)

Google DoublClick.net has been used by spammers for long time. The following is a report in 2008.

“Ad.doubleclick.net is recognized as a perilous adware application that causes unwanted redirections when surfing on the certain webpages. Actually it is another browser hijacker that aims to distribute frauds to make money.Commonly people pick up Ad.doubleclick virus when download softwares, browse porn site or read spam email attachments. It enters into computer sneakily after using computer insecurely.Ad.doubleclick.net is not just annoying, this malware traces users’ personal information, which would be utilized for cyber criminal."http://blog.mitechmate.com/remove-ad-doubleclick-net-redirect-virus/

(1.2.3)

Malwarebytes posted a news related to DoubleClick.net malvertising in 2014.

Several other similar products 0-day vulnerabilities have been found by some other bug hunter researchers before. Google has patched some of them. BugTraq is a full disclosure moderated mailing list for the *detailed* discussion and announcement of computer security vulnerabilities: what they are, how to exploit them, and how to fix them. The below things be posted to the Bugtraq list: (a) Information on computer or network related security vulnerabilities (UNIX, Windows NT, or any other). (b) Exploit programs, scripts or detailed processes about the above. (c) Patches, workarounds, fixes. (d) Announcements, advisories or warnings. (e) Ideas, future plans or current works dealing with computer/network security. (f) Information material regarding vendor contacts and procedures. (g) Individual experiences in dealing with above vendors or security organizations. (h) Incident advisories or informational reporting. (i) New or updated security tools. A large number of the fllowing web securities have been published here, Buffer overflow, HTTP Response Splitting (CRLF), CMD Injection, SQL injection, Phishing, Cross-site scripting, CSRF, Cyber-attack, Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards, Information Leakage, Denial of Service, File Inclusion, Weak Encryption, Privilege Escalation, Directory Traversal, HTML Injection, Spam. It also publishes suggestions, advisories, solutions details related to Open Redirect vulnerabilities and cyber intelligence recommendations.

(3) Google DoubleClick.net Can Adversely Affect Other Websites.

At the same time, Google DoubleClick.net can be used to do “Covert Redirect" to other websites, such as Google, eBay, The New York Times, etc.(Bypass other websites’ Open Redirect filters)

“Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software. Most of its profits are derived from AdWords, an online advertising service that places advertising near the list of search results. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 14 percent of its shares but control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful," and its unofficial slogan was “Don’t be evil". In 2004, Google moved to its new headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. The corporation has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world (as of 2007). It processes over one billion search requests and about 24 petabytes of user-generated data each day (as of 2009). In December 2013, Alexa listed google.com as the most visited website in the world. Numerous Google sites in other languages figure in the top one hundred, as do several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube and Blogger. Its market dominance has led to prominent media coverage, including criticism of the company over issues such as search neutrality, copyright, censorship, and privacy." (Wikipedia)

“eBay Inc. (stylized as ebay) is an American multinational corporation and e-commerce company, providing consumer to consumer & business to consumer sales services via Internet. It is headquartered in San Jose, California, United States. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995, and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble. Today, it is a multi-billion dollar business with operations localized in over thirty countries. The company manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide. In addition to its auction-style sales, the website has since expanded to include “Buy It Now" shopping; shopping by UPC, ISBN, or other kind of SKU (via Half.com); online classified advertisements (via Kijiji or eBay Classifieds); online event ticket trading (via StubHub); online money transfers (via PayPal) and other services. It is not a free website, but charges users an invoice fee when sellers have sold or listed any items." (Wikipedia)

(3.3) The New York Times (Nytimes.com) Covert Redirect Vulnerability Based on Google Doubleclick.net

Domain:nytimes.com

“The New York Times (NYT) is an American daily newspaper, founded and continuously published in New York City since September 18, 1851, by the New York Times Company. It has won 114 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization. The paper’s print version has the largest circulation of any metropolitan newspaper in the United States, and the second-largest circulation overall, behind The Wall Street Journal. It is ranked 39th in the world by circulation. Following industry trends, its weekday circulation has fallen to fewer than one million daily since 1990. Nicknamed for years as “The Gray Lady", The New York Times is long regarded within the industry as a national “newspaper of record". It is owned by The New York Times Company. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., (whose family (Ochs-Sulzberger) has controlled the paper for five generations, since 1896), is both the paper’s publisher and the company’s chairman. Its international version, formerly the International Herald Tribune, is now called the International New York Times." (Wikipedia)